One of the most important and valuable initiatives in filling in gaps in the documentation of the social history of South Africa was photographer Santu Mofokeng’s project Black Photo Album/Look at Me (1997). Starting in 1989, Mofokeng asked black families if he might make photographic copies of their old family photographs and asked them to unearth the images from drawers and boxes.
Black Photo Album/Look at Me is an extraordinary series of touched-up and reprinted images of these old photographs of groups of friends or families, gathered for the photographer outside the family home, dressed for a sporting occasion, or celebrating a particular event. By 1989, when Mofokeng started the project, the dispossession of black people by the apartheid government under the Group Areas Act of 1950, which decreed in which area each racial group could live, had long been completed. Black farmers had been chased off their land by government decree, black-owned homes of substance had been bought for a song and the previous owners forced to move into a residential area designated purely for blacks, and the general assumption among whites was that all blacks were, and always had been, poor.
Mofokeng’s family album–style presentation, then, documented a class of people that had been consistently—and conveniently—erased from South African social history by the dominant cultural and governmental forces in the past. The artist shows Black Photo Album in galleries sometimes as a continuous slide show and sometimes as prints, and has added accompanying text providing as much biographical and contextual information about the people in the image as possible.
Over a long and distinguished career, Mofokeng has worked in different photographic genres, from street photographer, to photojournalist on newspapers and as a member of the Afrapix collective, to documentary photographer, to artist. A 1986 series documented the “train churches” of Johannesburg: On the packed commuter trains from Soweto to the central city, religious services take place daily. The new work was part of a shift from overtly dramatic “newsworthy” images of the struggle for freedom to more intimate, everyday aspects of township and other community life, and the Black Photo Album can be seen as part of this context.
Although in Black Photo Album, Mofokeng assembles and frames the individual subjects in a way that they could not possibly have foretold when they commissioned or requested their photographs to be taken over a century ago, his authors hip is effectively unobtrusive. Each image is presented earnestly, in an attempt to preserve a sense of how the individuals in the portraits saw themselves. Thus, Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album immediately disables the reductive mechanisms of the racial stereotype and presents his subjects as they were, as individuals and also part of a larger narrative of pre- and post-apartheid South Africa.
Black Photo Album/Look at Me (work in progress)
Unidentified young men, c. 1900s.
Photograph of found object
Photographer: Unknown
© Santu Mofokeng
Black Photo Album /Look at Me (work in progress)
Cleophas and Martha Moatshe, c. 1900s. Cleophas and his wife Martha came from Boshoek, where he was a moderator in the breakaway Anglican Church. He died in 1923 from “drie dae,” influenza. This information comes from Moatshe from Mohlakeng, Randfontein.
Photograph of found object
Photographer: Unknown, Boshoek
© Santu Mofokeng
Black Photo Album /Look at Me (work in progress)
Elliot Phakane, c. 1900s. On the back of this photograph is written, “My brother Elliot Phakane, Bethlehem Location, OFS Stand No. 1161 . . .
January, fEByaRIE, MaRich, APRIL, may, june, august. Septembur, octoBer, November, BecemBer.” It was found in the box owned by Moeketsi Msomi, whose grandfather John Rees Phakane was a bishop in the A. M. E Church.
Photograph of found object
Photographer: Unknown
© Santu Mofokeng
Black Photo Album/Look at Me (work in progress)
Maliwase Langatshe, Nobusika Sibiya, Nomazinyane Mazibuko, and Ntombinjane Makhubu, sisters, from Kwa Mahamba in Swaziland, c. 1900. They settled in the Orange Free State, where they worked on farms. Maliwase married Stuurman, a smous (hawker), and worked as a washerwoman.
Photograph of found object
Photographers: Andrews, Harrismith
© Santu Mofokeng
Black Photo Album/Look at Me (work in progress)
Mmamothupi Motsoatsoe, c. 1910. Mmamothupi’s family was dispossessed of their land in the Orange Free State by the 1913 Land Act. They moved to Ventersdorp in the Transvaal. She worked as a domestic servant and was notorious for being a “cheeky and proud maid.” This information is from her daughters Sekeke and Evah Motsoatsoe of Orlando East.
Photograph of found object
Photographer: Unknown, Potchefstroom
© Santu Mofokeng